Hello! I stopped by the Github Education mixer at SIGCSE last week, and met @mozzadrella and @johndbritton, who were so patient and helpful with my Github Classroom questions! I had one more question that John said he could help me with if I stopped by the booth, but I didn’t end up having time.

So-- I’m interested in learning how to assign groups in Github Classroom, rather than having students self-select into groups. Can someone point me in the right direction of a resource? I’ve poked around in my Classroom quite a bit and can’t figure it out.

I’m pondering this question for the fall semester. My current thinking is that I’d use the existing group mechanism, but I’d tell students out of band who their partners are, and I’d give them specific instructions on how to name their repo (“use your NetIDs with a dash between them”). This gives me some amount of flexibility, since I want to assign students to partners from within their lab sections, and if a student doesn’t show up I want to be able to “re-pair” on the fly. As such, I don’t want to lock down pairings in a way that’s hard to break.